Aphorism of the Day, January 31, 2020
Ritual is the deliberate effort to interweave the ordinary repetitions of life with intentional ritual repetitions in the hope that it gives Godward orientation or living toward the image of God upon one's life.
Aphorism of the Day, January 30, 2020
The presentation of Jesus of Nazareth participating in the significant ritual life of Judaism highlights that the incarnation of divine life included ritual life. What is ritual life? It is the holy, communal, public "games" of totemic events of communal identity with an orientation toward learning to do things better today than yesterday. How so? Ritual mimics the reality of cycles of repetition of doing the same things in time. We encounter the same moral and spiritual challenges repeatedly and each time we face them we want to have learned from facing them before either from our own experience or vicariously from the experience of others in our community so that as we encounter fresh instances of "same human experiences," we will do so with better excellence. Ritual is the public teaching event of repentance in that it reminds us that our lives need continual renewal.
Aphorism of the Day, January 29, 2020
To be born into human society is to always, already having been ritualized, that is, to be given orientation into the repetitive patterns of a particular culture. Some of those rituals pertain to human being as homo religiosus or an orientation toward the human sense of the holy or that which incites the mysterium tremendum. Jesus was Presented as a babe with no choice about his participation in the Ritual Process of Judaism and in this his universal solidarity of being the All and in All Word of God, is emptied into the particular solidarity with Judaic religious culture. We ourselves are ritualized within the sacraments of the church so that we might ascend to the excellence of in "In-Christed" beings, living toward the All and in all Word of God.
Aphorism of the Day, January 28, 2020
The Presentation. It is a fact of human living that each person is always being presented to the ritual process of human cultures and the rituals of faith purport to guide the ritual process vis a vis toward the highest stamp or image on humanity of what we might be, or in biblical terms, the divine image. The Bible is a record of humanity being ritual presented toward our divine image.
Aphorism of the Day, January 27, 2020
On the 75th anniversary of the Liberation of Auschwitz, we need to be serious about probability thinking in terms of preventing such atrocities from ever happening again. Are dictatorships, kleptocracies, oligarchic run forms of governments or representative democracies more likely to present large scale human atrocities? What about the stalemates which allow the encroachment on democracies such that fickle manipulated “majorities (e.g. electoral college formats) can be used by oligarchic personalities to trade financial hegemony for human rights? Democracies beware!
Aphorism of the Day, January 26, 2020
Unity is an abstraction from the conditions of diversity. There are many but there is One ALL. Unity is the mystification of the individuals into a collectivity. Being is the abstraction of all becoming, probably because we know that we live by linguistic reduction. We reduce something to a word.
Aphorism of the Day, January 25, 2020
St. Paul had been an Inquisitioner for a party in Judaism which regarded followers of Jesus to be heretics worthy of death by stoning. It may be that killing in the name of his religious zeal caught up with him in confronting the commandment about not killing. Such a contradiction of his zeal involving a rottenness with perfection which gave him permission to kill others who disagreed with him, eventually caught up with him when he totally snapped in a Damascus Road conversion experience. Narrowly zealous Paul went on to become the extremely liberal Paul who opened the door of Christian faith to Gentiles without requiring adherences to the significant ritual purity practices of Judaism. Conversion results in the opening of the heart to others who are significant different than one is. Since life experience often involves the continuous exposure to people who are "different" than us, we need to see conversion as the continuous expansion of our hearts to allow different people into validity of faith experience without complying to our own preferential faith habits.
Aphorism of the Day, January 24, 2020
Imagine a "simple" fisherman from rural Galilee like Simon Peter becoming a world traveler, even ending up in Rome and becoming a respected "teacher/rabbi" in the Christian tradition developing abilities that he never knew he had as a fisherman in the family business. "Sure Rabbi Jesus, I will follow you because dad's business has too mouths to feed and if I leave there will be more to go around." Simple Simon the fisherman followed Rabbi Jesus and became such a renown Rabbi in the Jesus Movement that St. Paul accused people of saying they were "of Cephas" or specifically devoted to him perhaps as their baptizer and exclusive tradition. The writing of Paul to the Corinthian church indicate the nascent development of diverse Christian communions and denominations long before our day where churches are apparently divided by having a common Savior.
Aphorism of the Day, January 23, 2020
"I belong to the school of Hillel, or of Shammai, or of Gamaliel." St. Paul was aware of rabbinical "schools" deriving from prominent rabbis and he saw the Corinthian church dividing into loyalty cults to "Paul," "Cephas," or "Apollos." He had to deal with the issue of how to respect a mentor without making them an idol shading one's direct loyalty to Christ.
Aphorism of the Day, January 22, 2020
Very early in the Jesus Movement there is evidence that Christians were persons divided by having a common Savior, in that divided into the party of Paul, or Cephas, or Apollos. Paul noted these division in the Corinthian church and down play his role as one who baptized because being baptized by someone seemed to mean that you became their disciples and followers. One might wonder if this parallels prominent and learned rabbis gaining followers and devotees to their "schools" of rabbinic thought. Were there too many learned teachers of Christian thought in the Jesus Movement which made Paul decry the divisions into something akin to rabbinical schools?
Aphorism of the Day, January 21, 2020
Jesus said to the fishermen, "From now on you will fish for people..." One can be too literal about correspondences between fishing and evangelism. Does one who fishes commercially, catch fish for their own good? No, it is a predator-prey relationship. If one is evangelizing for one's own benefit, (how many souls can I catch for my church?), then evangelism is reduced to what is good for the evangelist and not the evangelized. A wiser intuitive correspondence between evangelism and fishing has to do with the fact that one's calling to follow Christ does not require one to burn bridges with the skills and talents that one has attained in life. Perhaps one of the most telling qualities of one who fishes is patience in light of the uncertainty of the when and how many of the catch. What does one do with waiting time? One can build relationships with colleagues and develop the ability to tell wonderful stories.
Aphorism of the Day, January 20, 2020
Writing in the present about the past is an exercise in implying, "What we have now is really what people in the past wanted and hoped for and now we have institutionalized those hopes and brought them to clearer articulation." The Gospels represents that life in the time of Jesus is a "future interior tense," or "this is how things will have been." The Gospels are evidence of the institutionalization of the original Jesus Movement with a highly developed symbology and manifold rhetorical strategies for the purpose of promulgation, standardization of the message and inculcating new members in a mystagogic practice.
Aphorism of the Day, January 19, 2020
Evangelism might involve wise "match-making" in helping a person weave the always already call of Christ into apparency in the natural process of befriending another person.
Aphorism of the Day, January 18, 2020
Rather than viewing the Gospel of John as being composed by dictation with "John" writing the whispers of the Dove in his ear, think of the Gospel as being a text which derived from many sessions within gathered churches of prayer, preaching, teaching, study and questions and answers. Think of the Gospel of John as a textual compilation of several decades of "Inquirer's Class" about walking in the Way of Christ.
Aphorism of the Day, January 17, 2020
In some ways the institutionalization of the success of spiritual transformation results in external products like hierarchies and buildings and properties which in turn become idols which have to be maintained. They become promoted because of the need to have the "masses" support them even while the inner spirituality which originated the success of movement has been lost.
Aphorism of the Day, January 16, 2020
One might say that in the Jesus Movement there began a process of spiritual stealth whereby the external kingdom of the ancient dreamed for Messiah was made interior. The immediate Messiah, Jesus the Christ, was not an external military intervening King, but was one who baptized the interior lives of people with the Holy Spirit. This does not violate the materiality of the "incarnation," rather it involved the motivating power to "clean hearts" and result in the body language acts which conform to deeds of the fruits of the Spirit. What is more Word made flesh then when love, joy, peace, gentleness, self-control, patience, justice, goodness and faith inhabits the deeds of people?
Aphorism of the Day, January 15, 2020
Reading the Gospels when they originally came to writing demanded an information context within which they were read. How does a Gentile church remain "moored" within the Judaic origin of lots the "theological/Christological" notions. John the Baptist quoted as "saying out of the blue," behold the Lamb of God. This is highly scripted text of the transition from Judaism in general and the Judaism as practiced by John the Baptist and his community. His community would have been a primary group to which the early Christians were making appeals. What would a Gentile have known about "Lamb of God" without residing within a teaching community which had a developed symbology.
Aphorism of the Day, January 14, 2020
Translation does not just have to do with language, it has to do human values which are imbedded in language through the cultures of people. When reading the Gospels, one tries to discern the cultures of the people to whom the Gospel writings are making their original appeals. Translation also means interpretation; the two can never be separated. For Jews, holy separation meant the observance of the customs of ritual purity. For the Gentile Christians, holiness was a matter of "inner Spirit," which was not the difference of external ritual purity but was the difference of another kind of spiritual practice. Translation on the cultural meaning of holiness and separation from the "world" resulted in the incommensurables which characterized the separation of religious communities.
Aphorism of the Day, January 13, 2020
One of my favorite "aside" phrases in the Gospel of John, is "which is translated." The writer translated Hebrew words and meanings to those who were not familiar with Hebraic phrases and notions. Gospel life is about translation, putting in the common language of the people whom one wants to share the Gospel. This means that the liturgy of what is called the Book of Common Prayer is not a final and fixed document, rather, communization is the process of making prayer accessibly common to the people for whom we want to "translate" the meaning of the Gospel.
Aphorism of the Day, January 12, 2020
The past sometimes is the mystery of "must have beenism." After the resurrection appearances of Jesus and the proliferation of such communal mystical experience to comprise an entire movement the mystery of the past of Jesus of Nazareth was a "must have been" which came to be written based upon oral tradition, contemporary genres of how one promulgates the lives of great people, and the template metaphors and stories of the Hebrew Scriptures for the great personalities written about.
Aphorism of the Day, January 11, 2020
"Kenosis" is the Greek word which expresses the "self emptying" of the divine into Jesus Christ, the Christ who is All and in All. Such an identity of the divine with All, not as a unconnected collection of infinite entities, but as total connection of everything, would be the kind of identity which be omni-incarnation justifying the validity of human experience being a way to adequately "know" the divine without presuming any omni-competence of the same.
Aphorism of the Day, January 10, 2020
The events in the life of Jesus which instantiate the theology of the "Word made flesh or incarnation," resides within a "it goes without saying paradigm." What is that paradigm? When it comes to inter-communication between the specie of humanity and the "specie" of God, people can only be anthropomorphic about God. The incarnation is the affirmation of human experience being a valid way to "know" God because of the assumption of "likeness" between the two parties which makes communication valid.
Aphorism of the Day, January 9, 2020
The synoptic Gospels regard the baptism of Jesus by John the Baptist to be the event of the declaration of Jesus as the beloved Son (of God implied). The declaration is in a heavenly voice. During this age, the Roman Senate would declare the August or divine identity of the Caesar and the deriving identity of the Caesar as a divi filii or divine son. The Roman senate conferring of divine status is contrasted with the Gospel understanding of the heavenly designation and announcement of the status of Jesus of Nazareth. Mystery religion gods and goddesses were not really human; Caesars and the notion of the Messiah implied a human who was divinized by divine selection and ratified by significant promulgation of such identity to make it the functional reality of significant community. The adoptive divinization of Jesus as God's Son was a view in early Christian community, countered with the belief that Jesus was the pre-existing Divine One who came into manifestation as a human person.
Aphorism of the Day, January 8, 2020
Baptism is an event of initiation into a community. Jesus was baptized by John the Baptist, perhaps indicative of his willingness to take solidarity and identity with the community of John the Baptist. With the mysticism of Paul who found the cosmic Christ to be all and in all, we should balance that with the particularity of Jesus of Nazareth who did not lord or proclaim his cosmic significance but was humbly one of us.
Aphorism of the Day, January 7, 2020
Theosis is the orthodox perspective on the "divinization" of a person, and is stated as God became hominized in Jesus Christ so that humanity might become divinized. If God cannot be known as God in the divine essence, how can God be known? In the divine energies which emanate from the Essence. If the divine image on humanity is "spirit," then that spirit can arise to know the divine energies such that the divine and human can experience something of the "amphibian" or "bi-linguality" which is required for the mutual communication between two distinctly different parties of "persons."
Aphorism of the Day, January 6, 2019
It is easy to regard Scriptures and the declaration of doctrines as words which are causatively absolute in "making such things happen." Does declaring the incarnation, make it happen or does the declaration arise from the honest acknowledgment that all speaking about God is anthropomorphic and thus requires the further acknowledgement that human experience is valid for knowing the non-human entity confessed as God? Incarnation is a confession of bi-linguality between humanity and the divine as the basis for humans knowing any about God who is in fact for people, a human experience. Apologies for stating the obvious that no one can have a non-human experience of God. As humans, we can never get outside of humanity.
Aphorism of the Day, January 5, 2020
The magi represented people like Abraham who had the benefit of having valid faith without being a Jew. That Christ was being manifested in the Gentile people was given an origin discourse in one Gospel. If Christ has been born into the lives of so many Gentiles, then it must have been intended at the beginning when Jesus was born.
Aphorism of the Day, January 4, 2019
If one's community possessed something that is regarded as being as a supreme life enhancement, should it be kept just to one's own community as an exclusive possession? The magi as symbols of the Epiphany or the manifestation of Christ to the outsiders, represent the Gentile mission of people who made a distant life journey and present their best gifts to witness the site of the Christ birth, "wink, wink," within their own lives as the action of the Holy Spirit.
Aphorism of the Day, January 3, 2019
"My house is to be a house of prayer for all people." Turns out that the caretakers of any particular house has limited affinities which for various reasons are off-putting or ungraspable relevant pieties to those who might otherwise want to be called to prayer. It is time to give up the notion that any one faith community or perspective is omni-competent to the prayer needs of everyone. The House of Science through the wisdom method of determining the very best of statistical actuarial probability is also a House of Worship which honors Wisdom as divine (ultimate) immanence.
Aphorism of the Day, January 2, 2019
Anonymous foreign magi in the infancy narratives seems to make the drawing power of Christ like the Caesar who was the Emperor of the world. Did the magi go to Rome to acknowledge the actual "king" of the world? The story is important in the evolution for the house of prayer to be one for all people. It is an aspiration which is challenged by the actual segregation found in many places of worship because of restrictive rules of "entrance." It is an irony that the institutionalization of faith practice meant to standardize and "process" the membership is equally efficient at keeping many people out who in many ways end up not "qualifying" for membership. Groucho said that he would never join a club which would accept him as a member. If God has mercy on all as "foreign" sinners, then mercy means we all have to learn to accept ourselves and each others as part of God's family.
Aphorism of the Day, January 1, 2020
What has become affects how one is interested in what was. How the life of Jesus was viewed and presented was affected by the dynamics of the post-resurrection appearances. It seems odd that no one thought it worthy to record events in the life of Jesus, save one, until his public ministry. From age one to age thirty did anyone know the significance of Jesus, at least enough to have recorded it? One can note the hiddenness of Jesus in the world in the history of the world and the lack of the Christ effect in the lives of people and even the life of the people of the church. One could pray for more apparitionally apparent presences of Christ in the lives of the church and in the lives of people of the world. How would we know? Love and Justice might be good indicators.
Ritual is the deliberate effort to interweave the ordinary repetitions of life with intentional ritual repetitions in the hope that it gives Godward orientation or living toward the image of God upon one's life.
Aphorism of the Day, January 30, 2020
The presentation of Jesus of Nazareth participating in the significant ritual life of Judaism highlights that the incarnation of divine life included ritual life. What is ritual life? It is the holy, communal, public "games" of totemic events of communal identity with an orientation toward learning to do things better today than yesterday. How so? Ritual mimics the reality of cycles of repetition of doing the same things in time. We encounter the same moral and spiritual challenges repeatedly and each time we face them we want to have learned from facing them before either from our own experience or vicariously from the experience of others in our community so that as we encounter fresh instances of "same human experiences," we will do so with better excellence. Ritual is the public teaching event of repentance in that it reminds us that our lives need continual renewal.
Aphorism of the Day, January 29, 2020
To be born into human society is to always, already having been ritualized, that is, to be given orientation into the repetitive patterns of a particular culture. Some of those rituals pertain to human being as homo religiosus or an orientation toward the human sense of the holy or that which incites the mysterium tremendum. Jesus was Presented as a babe with no choice about his participation in the Ritual Process of Judaism and in this his universal solidarity of being the All and in All Word of God, is emptied into the particular solidarity with Judaic religious culture. We ourselves are ritualized within the sacraments of the church so that we might ascend to the excellence of in "In-Christed" beings, living toward the All and in all Word of God.
Aphorism of the Day, January 28, 2020
The Presentation. It is a fact of human living that each person is always being presented to the ritual process of human cultures and the rituals of faith purport to guide the ritual process vis a vis toward the highest stamp or image on humanity of what we might be, or in biblical terms, the divine image. The Bible is a record of humanity being ritual presented toward our divine image.
Aphorism of the Day, January 27, 2020
On the 75th anniversary of the Liberation of Auschwitz, we need to be serious about probability thinking in terms of preventing such atrocities from ever happening again. Are dictatorships, kleptocracies, oligarchic run forms of governments or representative democracies more likely to present large scale human atrocities? What about the stalemates which allow the encroachment on democracies such that fickle manipulated “majorities (e.g. electoral college formats) can be used by oligarchic personalities to trade financial hegemony for human rights? Democracies beware!
Aphorism of the Day, January 26, 2020
Unity is an abstraction from the conditions of diversity. There are many but there is One ALL. Unity is the mystification of the individuals into a collectivity. Being is the abstraction of all becoming, probably because we know that we live by linguistic reduction. We reduce something to a word.
Aphorism of the Day, January 25, 2020
St. Paul had been an Inquisitioner for a party in Judaism which regarded followers of Jesus to be heretics worthy of death by stoning. It may be that killing in the name of his religious zeal caught up with him in confronting the commandment about not killing. Such a contradiction of his zeal involving a rottenness with perfection which gave him permission to kill others who disagreed with him, eventually caught up with him when he totally snapped in a Damascus Road conversion experience. Narrowly zealous Paul went on to become the extremely liberal Paul who opened the door of Christian faith to Gentiles without requiring adherences to the significant ritual purity practices of Judaism. Conversion results in the opening of the heart to others who are significant different than one is. Since life experience often involves the continuous exposure to people who are "different" than us, we need to see conversion as the continuous expansion of our hearts to allow different people into validity of faith experience without complying to our own preferential faith habits.
Aphorism of the Day, January 24, 2020
Imagine a "simple" fisherman from rural Galilee like Simon Peter becoming a world traveler, even ending up in Rome and becoming a respected "teacher/rabbi" in the Christian tradition developing abilities that he never knew he had as a fisherman in the family business. "Sure Rabbi Jesus, I will follow you because dad's business has too mouths to feed and if I leave there will be more to go around." Simple Simon the fisherman followed Rabbi Jesus and became such a renown Rabbi in the Jesus Movement that St. Paul accused people of saying they were "of Cephas" or specifically devoted to him perhaps as their baptizer and exclusive tradition. The writing of Paul to the Corinthian church indicate the nascent development of diverse Christian communions and denominations long before our day where churches are apparently divided by having a common Savior.
Aphorism of the Day, January 23, 2020
"I belong to the school of Hillel, or of Shammai, or of Gamaliel." St. Paul was aware of rabbinical "schools" deriving from prominent rabbis and he saw the Corinthian church dividing into loyalty cults to "Paul," "Cephas," or "Apollos." He had to deal with the issue of how to respect a mentor without making them an idol shading one's direct loyalty to Christ.
Aphorism of the Day, January 22, 2020
Very early in the Jesus Movement there is evidence that Christians were persons divided by having a common Savior, in that divided into the party of Paul, or Cephas, or Apollos. Paul noted these division in the Corinthian church and down play his role as one who baptized because being baptized by someone seemed to mean that you became their disciples and followers. One might wonder if this parallels prominent and learned rabbis gaining followers and devotees to their "schools" of rabbinic thought. Were there too many learned teachers of Christian thought in the Jesus Movement which made Paul decry the divisions into something akin to rabbinical schools?
Aphorism of the Day, January 21, 2020
Jesus said to the fishermen, "From now on you will fish for people..." One can be too literal about correspondences between fishing and evangelism. Does one who fishes commercially, catch fish for their own good? No, it is a predator-prey relationship. If one is evangelizing for one's own benefit, (how many souls can I catch for my church?), then evangelism is reduced to what is good for the evangelist and not the evangelized. A wiser intuitive correspondence between evangelism and fishing has to do with the fact that one's calling to follow Christ does not require one to burn bridges with the skills and talents that one has attained in life. Perhaps one of the most telling qualities of one who fishes is patience in light of the uncertainty of the when and how many of the catch. What does one do with waiting time? One can build relationships with colleagues and develop the ability to tell wonderful stories.
Aphorism of the Day, January 20, 2020
Writing in the present about the past is an exercise in implying, "What we have now is really what people in the past wanted and hoped for and now we have institutionalized those hopes and brought them to clearer articulation." The Gospels represents that life in the time of Jesus is a "future interior tense," or "this is how things will have been." The Gospels are evidence of the institutionalization of the original Jesus Movement with a highly developed symbology and manifold rhetorical strategies for the purpose of promulgation, standardization of the message and inculcating new members in a mystagogic practice.
Aphorism of the Day, January 19, 2020
Evangelism might involve wise "match-making" in helping a person weave the always already call of Christ into apparency in the natural process of befriending another person.
Aphorism of the Day, January 18, 2020
Rather than viewing the Gospel of John as being composed by dictation with "John" writing the whispers of the Dove in his ear, think of the Gospel as being a text which derived from many sessions within gathered churches of prayer, preaching, teaching, study and questions and answers. Think of the Gospel of John as a textual compilation of several decades of "Inquirer's Class" about walking in the Way of Christ.
Aphorism of the Day, January 17, 2020
In some ways the institutionalization of the success of spiritual transformation results in external products like hierarchies and buildings and properties which in turn become idols which have to be maintained. They become promoted because of the need to have the "masses" support them even while the inner spirituality which originated the success of movement has been lost.
Aphorism of the Day, January 16, 2020
One might say that in the Jesus Movement there began a process of spiritual stealth whereby the external kingdom of the ancient dreamed for Messiah was made interior. The immediate Messiah, Jesus the Christ, was not an external military intervening King, but was one who baptized the interior lives of people with the Holy Spirit. This does not violate the materiality of the "incarnation," rather it involved the motivating power to "clean hearts" and result in the body language acts which conform to deeds of the fruits of the Spirit. What is more Word made flesh then when love, joy, peace, gentleness, self-control, patience, justice, goodness and faith inhabits the deeds of people?
Aphorism of the Day, January 15, 2020
Reading the Gospels when they originally came to writing demanded an information context within which they were read. How does a Gentile church remain "moored" within the Judaic origin of lots the "theological/Christological" notions. John the Baptist quoted as "saying out of the blue," behold the Lamb of God. This is highly scripted text of the transition from Judaism in general and the Judaism as practiced by John the Baptist and his community. His community would have been a primary group to which the early Christians were making appeals. What would a Gentile have known about "Lamb of God" without residing within a teaching community which had a developed symbology.
Aphorism of the Day, January 14, 2020
Translation does not just have to do with language, it has to do human values which are imbedded in language through the cultures of people. When reading the Gospels, one tries to discern the cultures of the people to whom the Gospel writings are making their original appeals. Translation also means interpretation; the two can never be separated. For Jews, holy separation meant the observance of the customs of ritual purity. For the Gentile Christians, holiness was a matter of "inner Spirit," which was not the difference of external ritual purity but was the difference of another kind of spiritual practice. Translation on the cultural meaning of holiness and separation from the "world" resulted in the incommensurables which characterized the separation of religious communities.
Aphorism of the Day, January 13, 2020
One of my favorite "aside" phrases in the Gospel of John, is "which is translated." The writer translated Hebrew words and meanings to those who were not familiar with Hebraic phrases and notions. Gospel life is about translation, putting in the common language of the people whom one wants to share the Gospel. This means that the liturgy of what is called the Book of Common Prayer is not a final and fixed document, rather, communization is the process of making prayer accessibly common to the people for whom we want to "translate" the meaning of the Gospel.
Aphorism of the Day, January 12, 2020
The past sometimes is the mystery of "must have beenism." After the resurrection appearances of Jesus and the proliferation of such communal mystical experience to comprise an entire movement the mystery of the past of Jesus of Nazareth was a "must have been" which came to be written based upon oral tradition, contemporary genres of how one promulgates the lives of great people, and the template metaphors and stories of the Hebrew Scriptures for the great personalities written about.
Aphorism of the Day, January 11, 2020
"Kenosis" is the Greek word which expresses the "self emptying" of the divine into Jesus Christ, the Christ who is All and in All. Such an identity of the divine with All, not as a unconnected collection of infinite entities, but as total connection of everything, would be the kind of identity which be omni-incarnation justifying the validity of human experience being a way to adequately "know" the divine without presuming any omni-competence of the same.
Aphorism of the Day, January 10, 2020
The events in the life of Jesus which instantiate the theology of the "Word made flesh or incarnation," resides within a "it goes without saying paradigm." What is that paradigm? When it comes to inter-communication between the specie of humanity and the "specie" of God, people can only be anthropomorphic about God. The incarnation is the affirmation of human experience being a valid way to "know" God because of the assumption of "likeness" between the two parties which makes communication valid.
Aphorism of the Day, January 9, 2020
The synoptic Gospels regard the baptism of Jesus by John the Baptist to be the event of the declaration of Jesus as the beloved Son (of God implied). The declaration is in a heavenly voice. During this age, the Roman Senate would declare the August or divine identity of the Caesar and the deriving identity of the Caesar as a divi filii or divine son. The Roman senate conferring of divine status is contrasted with the Gospel understanding of the heavenly designation and announcement of the status of Jesus of Nazareth. Mystery religion gods and goddesses were not really human; Caesars and the notion of the Messiah implied a human who was divinized by divine selection and ratified by significant promulgation of such identity to make it the functional reality of significant community. The adoptive divinization of Jesus as God's Son was a view in early Christian community, countered with the belief that Jesus was the pre-existing Divine One who came into manifestation as a human person.
Aphorism of the Day, January 8, 2020
Baptism is an event of initiation into a community. Jesus was baptized by John the Baptist, perhaps indicative of his willingness to take solidarity and identity with the community of John the Baptist. With the mysticism of Paul who found the cosmic Christ to be all and in all, we should balance that with the particularity of Jesus of Nazareth who did not lord or proclaim his cosmic significance but was humbly one of us.
Aphorism of the Day, January 7, 2020
Theosis is the orthodox perspective on the "divinization" of a person, and is stated as God became hominized in Jesus Christ so that humanity might become divinized. If God cannot be known as God in the divine essence, how can God be known? In the divine energies which emanate from the Essence. If the divine image on humanity is "spirit," then that spirit can arise to know the divine energies such that the divine and human can experience something of the "amphibian" or "bi-linguality" which is required for the mutual communication between two distinctly different parties of "persons."
Aphorism of the Day, January 6, 2019
It is easy to regard Scriptures and the declaration of doctrines as words which are causatively absolute in "making such things happen." Does declaring the incarnation, make it happen or does the declaration arise from the honest acknowledgment that all speaking about God is anthropomorphic and thus requires the further acknowledgement that human experience is valid for knowing the non-human entity confessed as God? Incarnation is a confession of bi-linguality between humanity and the divine as the basis for humans knowing any about God who is in fact for people, a human experience. Apologies for stating the obvious that no one can have a non-human experience of God. As humans, we can never get outside of humanity.
Aphorism of the Day, January 5, 2020
The magi represented people like Abraham who had the benefit of having valid faith without being a Jew. That Christ was being manifested in the Gentile people was given an origin discourse in one Gospel. If Christ has been born into the lives of so many Gentiles, then it must have been intended at the beginning when Jesus was born.
Aphorism of the Day, January 4, 2019
If one's community possessed something that is regarded as being as a supreme life enhancement, should it be kept just to one's own community as an exclusive possession? The magi as symbols of the Epiphany or the manifestation of Christ to the outsiders, represent the Gentile mission of people who made a distant life journey and present their best gifts to witness the site of the Christ birth, "wink, wink," within their own lives as the action of the Holy Spirit.
Aphorism of the Day, January 3, 2019
"My house is to be a house of prayer for all people." Turns out that the caretakers of any particular house has limited affinities which for various reasons are off-putting or ungraspable relevant pieties to those who might otherwise want to be called to prayer. It is time to give up the notion that any one faith community or perspective is omni-competent to the prayer needs of everyone. The House of Science through the wisdom method of determining the very best of statistical actuarial probability is also a House of Worship which honors Wisdom as divine (ultimate) immanence.
Aphorism of the Day, January 2, 2019
Anonymous foreign magi in the infancy narratives seems to make the drawing power of Christ like the Caesar who was the Emperor of the world. Did the magi go to Rome to acknowledge the actual "king" of the world? The story is important in the evolution for the house of prayer to be one for all people. It is an aspiration which is challenged by the actual segregation found in many places of worship because of restrictive rules of "entrance." It is an irony that the institutionalization of faith practice meant to standardize and "process" the membership is equally efficient at keeping many people out who in many ways end up not "qualifying" for membership. Groucho said that he would never join a club which would accept him as a member. If God has mercy on all as "foreign" sinners, then mercy means we all have to learn to accept ourselves and each others as part of God's family.
Aphorism of the Day, January 1, 2020
What has become affects how one is interested in what was. How the life of Jesus was viewed and presented was affected by the dynamics of the post-resurrection appearances. It seems odd that no one thought it worthy to record events in the life of Jesus, save one, until his public ministry. From age one to age thirty did anyone know the significance of Jesus, at least enough to have recorded it? One can note the hiddenness of Jesus in the world in the history of the world and the lack of the Christ effect in the lives of people and even the life of the people of the church. One could pray for more apparitionally apparent presences of Christ in the lives of the church and in the lives of people of the world. How would we know? Love and Justice might be good indicators.
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